Pacific Northwest Ethnography
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Recent papers in Pacific Northwest Ethnography
This paper considers the ways in which information on coastal earthquakes is presented in Indigenous oral traditions and uses these to estimate the date of the most recent major seismic event.
The Norwegian Adrian Jacobsen collected seven thousand objects on the northwest coast of America and in Alaska for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. He had close ties with the Hamburg zoo director Carl Hagenbeck, both in business and in... more
Coast Salish First Nations wove their robes and blankets from yarn spun from processed wool fibres. A curious fact, usually mentioned in passing by early explorers, ethnographers, and settlers, is that, in the preparation of wool fibres,... more
"In the Land of the Totem Poles: Native Cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Native Cultures of Western Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast: An Overview of Recent Scholarship," An overview essay with reference to scholarship on the... more
Artifact DkSf-2:62 resembles a projectile point, but has a squared dull edge and a distinctive notched base.
A single feather as symbol of all-encompassing divine balance was manifested in ancient Egypt to meet its complex needs as a state that embraced diverse peoples with conflictng interests. Balance, and consciously following developed inner... more
The ethnographic studies of Edward Sapir and Philip Drucker have provided the major written sources on Nuu-chah-nulth culture. This paper integrates the ethnographic and oral history information with recent archaeological data from... more
This article presents evidence for the antiquity and development of Nuu-chah-nulth whaling, drawing on recent archaeological work in Barkley Sound. DNA identifications of whale species reveal past whaling practices. The evidence is... more
What follows are the ethnographic comparisons between the Nehalem Indians in * Chapter 6 of “Francis Drake in Nehalem Bay 1579, Setting the Historical Record Straight” (2011) with those first recorded by Reverend Francis Fletcher in the... more
This extraordinary story relates the story of the acquisition of a fabled native Copper by the Tsimshian chief Wasaiks, who was based at the village of Fort Simpson/Lax-Kw’alaams, British Columbia. Wasaiks developed an overwhelming... more
The analysis of kinship relations and kinship terminology, has long been a central focus of anthropological inquiry. Additionally, linguistic relationships and changes in languages have often been argued to reflect prehistoric intergroup... more
The figure of the Wild Man resides at the hinge where nature meets culture. In the Pacific Northwest , the Wild Man is known locally by different names and is interpreted through a variety of cultural and historical lenses. Settler... more
Coast Salish textiles, from the Pacific Northwest (NW Washington State and SW British Columbia) are relatively rare and unknown, yet are masterpieces of sophisticated weaving and spinning techniques. Coast Salish... more
Book review: Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth by Leslie H. Tepper, Janice George, and Willard Joseph Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2017 $40.00 (U.S.) / 9780803296923 Reviewed... more
On the Northwest Coast of North America we have been actively recovering perishable artifacts from wet sites over the past thirty plus years, revealing many new prehistoric cultural dimensions concerning thousands of years of cultural... more
This study addresses the relative absence of archaeological considerations of gender and, specifically, the underrepresented role of women in the pre-contact period of the Southern Plateau. Ethnographic and ethnohistorical records are... more
This paper is somewhat dated, based on only the first few months of my fieldwork in 2013, and no longer representative of my current work and thinking. Chapter Abstract: 'This chapter is a long overdue update to the ethnographic... more
This dance drum is the result of a collaboration between David Boxley and his son David Robert Boxley, renowned Tsimshian sculptors actively engaged in the revival, preservation and recognition of the cul- ture and arts of the peoples of... more
Dialect identification studies of U.S. regional dialects abound, yet few studies have explicitly compared listener perception of U.S. and Canadian dialects. A notable exception is Niedzielski (1999), which reveals the effect of social... more
Language ideologies have been acknowledged as an important factor in linguistic behavior, and all the more in border regions (Bourdieu 1991, Irvine & Gal 2000, V. Friedman 2012, Auer 2005). This work considers the variable ideologies of... more
During the last part of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Kingdom organized one of the largest scientific expeditions for the documentation of the New World. Lead by the Italian navigator Alessandro Malaspina (1754–1810), the expedition... more